A substantial philosophical literature explores the "unity of consciousness": If I experience A, B, and C at the same time, A, B, and C will normally in some sense (exactly what sense is disputed) be experientially conjoined.
Thanks for opening up this question of unity as it pertains to our conscious experience. I read this article a few days ago and walked away with some unidentified frustration. After reflection, I can contribute three main points as soft-rebuttals.
First, I think the notion of attention/focus deserves more consideration and it would help fill in the question of “degrees of consciousness”. I think it’s through our faculty of attending that we have the feeling/experience of unity. There is mention of sensation and awareness but more should be said on this point.
Second, while the brain is certainly more malleable and capacious than we’ve once thought, does it really make sense to say the brain is loosely integrated? Trillions of synaptic connections, contra-laterality, topographical relationship (cortical homunculus), as well as the inhibitory functions of the hemispheres, gives us an indication of an evolutionary inheritance that is integrated at the level of electrical current and chemical reaction. We refer to the brain as a unit for good reason, in my opinion.
Third, psychopathology should make more of an appearance here and it would help give us reference to what disunity looks and sounds like in so far as we have uncovered the workings of the mind and the ways it can fail to achieve balance, well-being etc. I think we can do this without being overly prescriptive or normalizing.
The arguments presented here ultimately do little to undermine my direct experience. Actually, I think introspection does the muddling you claim it undoes. It’s our reflective capacities, strongly influenced by language, that encourages us to dissect, categorize and delimit. When I reflect on even the smallest tasks, I can systematize and describe various parts of that activity…but when I am lost in the task at hand, the self disappears…if unity of consciousness means anything, I believe it is found in these states of flow and immersion that are disturbed by introspection.
I look forward to reading more of your work and am happy to be part of the conversation!
Thanks for these thoughts, Stefan! On 1: It might follow on the view you suggest that if there are unattended aspects of experience they aren't unified with the others, yes? On 2: It's a matter of degree of course; some intermediate degree of connectivity seems right and thus some intermediate degree of connectedness/co-consciousness, not all-or-nothing unity. On 3: There's a bit of a literature on "split-brain" cases as one relevant example, e.g. Thomas Nagel, Elizabeth Schechter.
Thanks for a wonderfully thought-provoking article, Eric!
Stefan might be onto something with his comment about attention. You may find the cognitive psychology and neuroscience research discussing the relationship between attention and consciousness particularly interesting, as it touches on many of the ideas you've raised.
This debate broadly falls into two schools of thought:
1. We are conscious of more than we attend to (a 'consciousness is richer than you think' view, similar to the idea that consciousness is unified).
2. We are only conscious of what we attend to (which suggest consciousness is less rich than we think it is). This view aligns more closely with the idea that consciousness isn't as unified or rich as we think it is. Attention seems to do the unifying, but because our attention is limited, it's not very unified.
Thanks for this suggestion, Suzi! I agree that unity and attention might be related and that if so the second view makes disunity more likely. For some of my work on our poor knowledge of the relationship between consciousness and attention, see:
It seems that while you argue well that it’s hard to introspectively prove that consciousness *is* unified, since introspection itself seems to have some unifying tendency, conversely if you could have an introspection of a *dis*unified phenomenology that would be more convincing evidence that consciousness really isn’t generally unified. If we grant this then this seems like an opportunity to get testamentary evidence from skilled meditators. I am not a particularly skilled meditator but my understanding is that most of them find that under sufficiently careful attention one finds that there is “no self”, ie the central unifying process we imagine ourselves to have, or even to be, does not in fact exist. So I think the claim here is probably right. I wonder how much opportunity for collaborations between analytic philosophers and meditators of this kind there is; it seems like a missed opportunity sometimes when the philosopher proposes a model of mind mainly out of abstract thought, with some untrained attempts at support from introspection, when there is are so many long and deep traditions of trained introspection.
Yes, I think there is some untapped potential here. I am not sure I wholly trust the self-reports of expert meditators, either, though I think they have some advantages over ordinary, untrained introspectors. There's a minor literature that looks for neural and behavioral correlates with meditators' self-reports, finding some encouraging results -- though likely with a publication bias toward positive results. On "no self" -- such a huge tradition and so many ways of interpreting that. I would be interested, and unsurprised, to find some people in that tradition describing disunity in the sense of the post. (References welcome.)
If retrospection turns the light on in the fridge each time we try to sneak a peek at introspection itself, maybe the safest bet is to say internal time is either the unity of consciousness or a key feature to experience. Husserl and Kant...I think they're onto something! Anyway—to pull a Descartes—you can't doubt internal time while retrospecting! (But then again, in that case you might not be really retrospecting...)
How do we differentiate between retrospecting and introspecting? At what point does one become the other? I guess that's why they call it a "stream" of consciousness. But then, where should our skepticism begin? I'm skeptical of wholesale skepticism. The further back we go in time, the more I'm willing to be skeptical.
I'm inclined to agree that consciousness can come in degrees. Certain experiences come in degrees, especially in perception. Something appears to us indistinctly at first and gradually approaches until it reaches a tipping point where it transforms, like the warping of music from an ice cream truck as it passes us by. Like running a hand under the faucet and waiting for the water to turn hot. Maybe consciousness can be like that, too, although I've never experienced it as a smooth continuum. Still, it's hard to ignore that hint of disunity from our dreams—but if we want to say this I don't see how we can throw retrospection or introspection under the bus! (Or ice cream truck.)
Not at all off topic. I'm inclined to reject Descartes' and Husserl's indubitability claims about the introspective moment, but that's a long, complicated discussion!
Your questions pose great challenges, but not, I think, to the unity of conscious experience in particular but to the idea of unification in general. Each of your questions could be slightly revised to challenge, say, the unity of objects (e.g. the question is whether this rock is a unity and not whether it's a series of strata that just happen to have been pressed together). So I think you've got a pretty good argument that the idea of unity is difficult to preserve under increasingly close inspection.
Well, yes. There’s always a gap between parts and wholes. But good luck getting philosophers interested in why that might be. They’re interested in particular gaps, like in consciousness or knowledge or value or rocks or whatever. But the actual problem is entirely mereological and content- neutral.
There are also a lot of resonances (which Blackmore mentions) with Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts model, a variant of the global workspace theory, but without any single event where the content is suddenly in consciousness. In this view, whether we were conscious of something is always an after the fact determination, depending on which neural circuit coalition managed to recruit the right hippocampal and language centers.
It's a powerfully counter-intuitive view of the mind, one many people see as unacceptably eliminative, since it does away with the idea of a constant theater of the mind, and replaces it with retrospective reconstructions that we take to be the ongoing theater, the stream of consciousness. But it seems a lot easier to reconcile with neuroscientific data.
Thanks for the link to Blackmore! I think it is broadly in her spirit, though I regard myself as a phenomenal realist rather than an illusionist. On Dennett: Yes, even more so! I was inspired to these thoughts in part by thinking about his fame-in-the-brain model, his Stalin/Orwell dilemma, and his observations of functional dissociation.
It doesn't seem like Blackmore is a phenomenal illusionist either. Her illusionism seems more focused on the grand visual illusion and what she calls "delusionism", which I think matches Dennett's fame-in-the-brain model, and what you're discussing here. I've actually long felt that this is actually more disconcerting, more radical, than phenomenal illusionism (which honestly I see as more definitional differences, at least among physicalists).
This all seems plausible to me - though at least in part because I'm also not sure what phenomenon "unity" is supposed to pick out here. Still, when I remember a philosophical thought I had, sometimes I remember that I had it while (driving/eating/climbing a mountain/whatever) but often I just remember the flow of thought and don't remember what it was supposedly connected to. This obviously isn't much evidence for the disunity, but it seems relevant. (If they were unified in experience, then remembering one would usually involve remembering the other? It certainly sometimes does, but not always.)
My default expectation is that conscious experiences form some sort of network, that is not a complete graph where everything is connected to everything else, and is also not totally sparse, but has some amount of structure to its connectivity (the more short paths there are between one experience and another, the more likely they are to be connected directly as well).
Yes, that seems the natural picture on functional/structural grounds. I think the main reason that philosophers tend not to default to that view is probably that it seems so phenomenologically obvious that experience is unified -- an impression that of course this post is aimed at undermining.
Thanks for opening up this question of unity as it pertains to our conscious experience. I read this article a few days ago and walked away with some unidentified frustration. After reflection, I can contribute three main points as soft-rebuttals.
First, I think the notion of attention/focus deserves more consideration and it would help fill in the question of “degrees of consciousness”. I think it’s through our faculty of attending that we have the feeling/experience of unity. There is mention of sensation and awareness but more should be said on this point.
Second, while the brain is certainly more malleable and capacious than we’ve once thought, does it really make sense to say the brain is loosely integrated? Trillions of synaptic connections, contra-laterality, topographical relationship (cortical homunculus), as well as the inhibitory functions of the hemispheres, gives us an indication of an evolutionary inheritance that is integrated at the level of electrical current and chemical reaction. We refer to the brain as a unit for good reason, in my opinion.
Third, psychopathology should make more of an appearance here and it would help give us reference to what disunity looks and sounds like in so far as we have uncovered the workings of the mind and the ways it can fail to achieve balance, well-being etc. I think we can do this without being overly prescriptive or normalizing.
The arguments presented here ultimately do little to undermine my direct experience. Actually, I think introspection does the muddling you claim it undoes. It’s our reflective capacities, strongly influenced by language, that encourages us to dissect, categorize and delimit. When I reflect on even the smallest tasks, I can systematize and describe various parts of that activity…but when I am lost in the task at hand, the self disappears…if unity of consciousness means anything, I believe it is found in these states of flow and immersion that are disturbed by introspection.
I look forward to reading more of your work and am happy to be part of the conversation!
Best to you, professor!
Thanks for these thoughts, Stefan! On 1: It might follow on the view you suggest that if there are unattended aspects of experience they aren't unified with the others, yes? On 2: It's a matter of degree of course; some intermediate degree of connectivity seems right and thus some intermediate degree of connectedness/co-consciousness, not all-or-nothing unity. On 3: There's a bit of a literature on "split-brain" cases as one relevant example, e.g. Thomas Nagel, Elizabeth Schechter.
Thanks for a wonderfully thought-provoking article, Eric!
Stefan might be onto something with his comment about attention. You may find the cognitive psychology and neuroscience research discussing the relationship between attention and consciousness particularly interesting, as it touches on many of the ideas you've raised.
This debate broadly falls into two schools of thought:
1. We are conscious of more than we attend to (a 'consciousness is richer than you think' view, similar to the idea that consciousness is unified).
2. We are only conscious of what we attend to (which suggest consciousness is less rich than we think it is). This view aligns more closely with the idea that consciousness isn't as unified or rich as we think it is. Attention seems to do the unifying, but because our attention is limited, it's not very unified.
Thanks again for a great article!
Thanks for this suggestion, Suzi! I agree that unity and attention might be related and that if so the second view makes disunity more likely. For some of my work on our poor knowledge of the relationship between consciousness and attention, see:
https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ExpWOAttn.htm
Amazing -- this was the topic of my PhD thesis!
If you have a sharable copy or article on the topic derived from your thesis, I'd be interested to see.
Some of articles I’ve had published can be found on my website suzitravis.com/neuroscience
It seems that while you argue well that it’s hard to introspectively prove that consciousness *is* unified, since introspection itself seems to have some unifying tendency, conversely if you could have an introspection of a *dis*unified phenomenology that would be more convincing evidence that consciousness really isn’t generally unified. If we grant this then this seems like an opportunity to get testamentary evidence from skilled meditators. I am not a particularly skilled meditator but my understanding is that most of them find that under sufficiently careful attention one finds that there is “no self”, ie the central unifying process we imagine ourselves to have, or even to be, does not in fact exist. So I think the claim here is probably right. I wonder how much opportunity for collaborations between analytic philosophers and meditators of this kind there is; it seems like a missed opportunity sometimes when the philosopher proposes a model of mind mainly out of abstract thought, with some untrained attempts at support from introspection, when there is are so many long and deep traditions of trained introspection.
Yes, I think there is some untapped potential here. I am not sure I wholly trust the self-reports of expert meditators, either, though I think they have some advantages over ordinary, untrained introspectors. There's a minor literature that looks for neural and behavioral correlates with meditators' self-reports, finding some encouraging results -- though likely with a publication bias toward positive results. On "no self" -- such a huge tradition and so many ways of interpreting that. I would be interested, and unsurprised, to find some people in that tradition describing disunity in the sense of the post. (References welcome.)
If retrospection turns the light on in the fridge each time we try to sneak a peek at introspection itself, maybe the safest bet is to say internal time is either the unity of consciousness or a key feature to experience. Husserl and Kant...I think they're onto something! Anyway—to pull a Descartes—you can't doubt internal time while retrospecting! (But then again, in that case you might not be really retrospecting...)
How do we differentiate between retrospecting and introspecting? At what point does one become the other? I guess that's why they call it a "stream" of consciousness. But then, where should our skepticism begin? I'm skeptical of wholesale skepticism. The further back we go in time, the more I'm willing to be skeptical.
I'm inclined to agree that consciousness can come in degrees. Certain experiences come in degrees, especially in perception. Something appears to us indistinctly at first and gradually approaches until it reaches a tipping point where it transforms, like the warping of music from an ice cream truck as it passes us by. Like running a hand under the faucet and waiting for the water to turn hot. Maybe consciousness can be like that, too, although I've never experienced it as a smooth continuum. Still, it's hard to ignore that hint of disunity from our dreams—but if we want to say this I don't see how we can throw retrospection or introspection under the bus! (Or ice cream truck.)
By the way, I was thinking phenomenologically without regard for the neuroscience theories, so apologies if what I said is off topic.
Not at all off topic. I'm inclined to reject Descartes' and Husserl's indubitability claims about the introspective moment, but that's a long, complicated discussion!
Your questions pose great challenges, but not, I think, to the unity of conscious experience in particular but to the idea of unification in general. Each of your questions could be slightly revised to challenge, say, the unity of objects (e.g. the question is whether this rock is a unity and not whether it's a series of strata that just happen to have been pressed together). So I think you've got a pretty good argument that the idea of unity is difficult to preserve under increasingly close inspection.
Yes, I'm inclined to think that rocks too are only partly unified and not sharp-boundaried.
Well, yes. There’s always a gap between parts and wholes. But good luck getting philosophers interested in why that might be. They’re interested in particular gaps, like in consciousness or knowledge or value or rocks or whatever. But the actual problem is entirely mereological and content- neutral.
David Chapman and Brian Cantwell Smith have strong interest in the general issue of fuzzy unity.
Thanks for the suggestions!
I agree — my own experience as well as my work with patients makes the disunity of conscious apparent.
An excellent post Eric! I agree with most, if not all of it!
One person who has often explored a view like this is Susan Blackmore: https://www.susanblackmore.uk/lectures/are-you-sure-youre-conscious-now-2/
There are also a lot of resonances (which Blackmore mentions) with Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts model, a variant of the global workspace theory, but without any single event where the content is suddenly in consciousness. In this view, whether we were conscious of something is always an after the fact determination, depending on which neural circuit coalition managed to recruit the right hippocampal and language centers.
It's a powerfully counter-intuitive view of the mind, one many people see as unacceptably eliminative, since it does away with the idea of a constant theater of the mind, and replaces it with retrospective reconstructions that we take to be the ongoing theater, the stream of consciousness. But it seems a lot easier to reconcile with neuroscientific data.
Sorry, that link didn't go where I thought it did. This one gives a more comprehensive description: https://www.susanblackmore.uk/articles/delusions-of-consciousness/
Thanks for the link to Blackmore! I think it is broadly in her spirit, though I regard myself as a phenomenal realist rather than an illusionist. On Dennett: Yes, even more so! I was inspired to these thoughts in part by thinking about his fame-in-the-brain model, his Stalin/Orwell dilemma, and his observations of functional dissociation.
It doesn't seem like Blackmore is a phenomenal illusionist either. Her illusionism seems more focused on the grand visual illusion and what she calls "delusionism", which I think matches Dennett's fame-in-the-brain model, and what you're discussing here. I've actually long felt that this is actually more disconcerting, more radical, than phenomenal illusionism (which honestly I see as more definitional differences, at least among physicalists).
This all seems plausible to me - though at least in part because I'm also not sure what phenomenon "unity" is supposed to pick out here. Still, when I remember a philosophical thought I had, sometimes I remember that I had it while (driving/eating/climbing a mountain/whatever) but often I just remember the flow of thought and don't remember what it was supposedly connected to. This obviously isn't much evidence for the disunity, but it seems relevant. (If they were unified in experience, then remembering one would usually involve remembering the other? It certainly sometimes does, but not always.)
My default expectation is that conscious experiences form some sort of network, that is not a complete graph where everything is connected to everything else, and is also not totally sparse, but has some amount of structure to its connectivity (the more short paths there are between one experience and another, the more likely they are to be connected directly as well).
Yes, that seems the natural picture on functional/structural grounds. I think the main reason that philosophers tend not to default to that view is probably that it seems so phenomenologically obvious that experience is unified -- an impression that of course this post is aimed at undermining.